Stirring the pot at Flickr

GoSpeed Racer

10 years ago

Advertisements

Stirring the Pot at Flickr

Normally I am an easy going, happy go lucky sort of avatar. Staying out of trouble (mostly), having fun, exploring, yadda yadda yadda… . There are times though when I get restless and want to rattle cages. Sometimes I rattle a bit too hard, but my intent is to make a point and not hurt somebody. This week I really stepped in it and caused a bit of a fuss. As many of you know there is a Flickr SL feed on the Linden Labs Blog. The general Second Life Pool is one of the most visible and heavily used SL photo pools and is prone to abuse. The only posted rule is this :

20 Sep 07 –Remember guys, the Second Life Group is a PG group. No nudity – thanks!

Nothing else, period. As I write this it is still written that way. For the past few months I’ve steadily noticed more racier and some downright nudity on the stream, some shots I saw right on the LL Blog page! A few were removed quickly, but most it seemed simply disappeared deeply into the archives. I decided to do a test and see what would happen. I did a series of pictures using poses where my avatar’s hands covered her breast. I uploaded them and flagged them as unsafe. Flagging them as unsafe will prevent them from being shown to people who opt out of seeing pics in that category. It also filters them out of Flickr feeds. I know for a fact that my RSS reader not show unsafe content on either my Google or Yahoo start pages. The only way you can see my unsafe content is to deliberately access it by lowering your thresholds on the Flickr page.

So, I posted the pics, attributed them as unsafe and submitted them to several SL related pools including the Second Life Pool. The next morning 3 out of the 5 were removed. OK, somebody was on the ball that night. I posted to the discussion forum and asked, well more like demanded somebody post the official standards, the rules, the cotton pickin’ guidelines. Sadly my tone was not the civil tone I normally use and it kinda put off some of the moderators.(Note to self, leave the sarcasm for people who get it.) On a positive note they did list point by point what was a no-go (no pun intended). However, they have failed to make it a public policy. Even with Torley Linden himself weighing in on the subject I don’t think they truly understand what I was trying to get across. While it may be impossible to adequately monitor the stream with 8 people it certainly would be helpful if everyone who posted had access to a full set of comprehensive rules. What may happen eventually is that something offensive will be posted, seen on the SL Blog page and the feed will be yanked, probably never to be returned or replaced by another. I can’t say they weren’t warned.

Below the fold are the pics I submitted to the feed:

I am linking to my Zooomr feed in case some of my readers have difficulties viewing pics from my Flickr feed:

I can certainly understand pulling the ones with the nip-slippage. But what about all those shots with sheer and see thru-tops? Hmmm…. Guess they’ll be yanked too!